just a regular old acoustic bridge. I wanted to cut and shape it differently and make it a floating bridge, but the darn thing came with a plastic looking saddle that is thinner than the bone saddle blanks that I have been using . the slot on the bridge fits it nicely, but the slot is too thin and too shallow to fit the rod piezo or a bone saddle.
It depends on what type of bridge you want/have. If you have a slot big enough to take the width of the piezo you can use a jumbo paperclip as I did here for an old 3/4 classical guitar I had http://www.cigarboxnation.com/forum/topics/installing-my-piezo-prea... (about half way down) - the slot wasn't deep enough for the piezo rod plus standard saddle.
If you try a seach of the building forum for piezo rod/piezo bridge etc you will get some more ideas of what you can do. What kind of wooden bridge have you got?
I'm assuming that it came with an nder saddle piezo? how exactly did you embed it? I have a preamp and an under saddle piezo and am trying to figure out how to mount it in a wooden bridge. I have heard that the piezo has to have contact with the saddle or it will feedback, I don't have a router and my existing saddle slot is not deep, long or wide enough to fit the piezo!
I picked up one of these from CB GITTY- (I'd rather help one of our own guys, than send it overseas) I stuck it in a good sized cigar box and embedded the rod piezzo in the bridge. Great full tone! Much more bass than a regular piezzo, and you can taylor the sound.
The CE symbol, when it first became an industry practice, I'll guess early-mid 90's, essentially translates to 'Certified for Europe', but I think the words may actually be French.
I went to some training on it in the mid-90's, so I dunno what may have changed, but then it was required by the EU for importers of products (electronic, electrical, perhaps anything where safety needs to be assured), but VOLUNTARY to apply to such product. That doesn't sound like it makes a lot of sense. The catch was exporters needed to have registered executive(s) with an office on European soil who were legally responsible for compliance to safety standards implemented in EU countries...voluntary to participate, if one wanted to do business in Europe, but expected to indicate compliance if opted to be displayed on product. The office on the 'Continent' was to put some teeth behind fraudulent display of the logo...if product safety was deficient and demonstrably at fault for any significant injury, the executive on European soil was to be the one legally liable. I had a boss who fell into the category of immediately assuming the labels could simply be applied to our products since he was sure 'everyone else' lied about UL etc. with products imported into the US. A case of Pointy-Haired Boss from the Dilbert comic.
Anyway, that never happened.
The ones I saw on eBay, and the one I purchased, had no Belcat logo. I just searched for 7545R or whatever it said until I found Belcat.
If you look up the DigiQ-10 DSP preamp system on the Belcat site, it has their logo. If you look at the Washburn site (all of this took a little persistence), theirs has a Washburn logo on it.
On the other hand, Washburn has an Equis line that looks different to me, and they also have Fishman products, so I guess one can't generalize too much...I think they use what does what they need and that can change as they see fit.
I started out building JFET preamps of what I was trying to do, and there were enough violin preamps on the market that subscribed to the discrete parts over IC's school of thought I tried to go that way. Worked fine, but I got sick of trying to Altoid-tin my headaches. Since this Belcat thing was too big for me anyway, here I am back to Altoids tins.
Thanks for posting the physical dimensions. I just suggested someone do this, saw it had already happened, and came back to edit this post!
I'm one of those people who has some thin boxes and would have gotten pretty far along before realizing I had 10 pounds of preamp for a 5 pound box....
Thanks Murray (and everyone else) for the VERY informative post. I'm still not sure which way I'm going to go. This will be my first CBG build and it's going to be for personal use. So I want to make it a nice build with quality stuff and since it's not for resale, my build budget isn't constrained as much as it would be if I was trying to build for a profit. But these looked like a pretty cheap, easy, way to get all the electrical stuff done in one little package. Since it's my first build, I want to do something fairly easy, but at the same time, I obviously want it to sound good and not be some piece of junk that I'm never going to want to play or that I'm going to want to change out right away because I'm not happy with the sound.
This is getting complicated...here's the lowly $12 model 7545R described above:it comes in different-curvature housings for different guitar bodies, but you don't seem to have any choice on eBay, and the two sellers I asked couldn't even give me external dimensions or hole size or depth required in an instrument (I bet they just have it drop-shipped and didn't have it in-hand to measure). [/quote]
I have a 7545R (from CB Gitty). The dimensions for the hole are 3.5 L" x 1.5" W..(85mm x 35mm).
Most CB are at least 65mm (2.5 " deep) and if it will just fit on the 40mm part of the box that is not part of the lid.
[quote]
Overkill for a ciggie-B, huh?
[/quote]
No, not if you have a humbucker or single coil in it as well. Glad you found their website, All I could find on the metal box was "CE" which I think is some conforming to a european standard for ??? Rf interference..would be my guess.
I like their piezo bridge offerings as well. The B-7612 looks like an interesting one for a six string.
[quote]
Would be nice to know what it costs but they didn't respond, as I mentioned.
Hope this was interesting, if not helpful...
[/quote]
Yes, very informative. I didn't know who made these except obviously in China based on the price.
Glad someone found it interesting! I also realize how ironic it that 20 people will have them built into guitars and I'll still be scraping another layer off to see what is underneath...
I was frustrated that all those other options were there lurking under my nose, and couldn't help but wonder how inexpensive the rest were...20 sources for the one in question, the rest being vaporware or a scarce one for US$100 or more...don't need 'em that badly.
I haven't put one in an instrument yet. I bought one to see how big it was & if it would fit in the side of a violin...nope, too fat. So, then I took it apart to see what was inside and if I could separate the parts like 'outboarding' the slide pots. Ironic I bought something made in China to partially reverse engineer it, how's that for outsourcing 'payback' ?
So here's kind of a review of what's inside, since I can't tell you what it sounds like. I just plugged it into guitar amp. It's been a while - I can't remember if I used the little molded plastic bridge-shaped pickup it came with, or the 'wrap' elastic-mounted polymer piezo pickup I made, copying Headway Electronics' "The Band". I just tapped it to see if I could hear it and turned the volume up to see how noisy the entire system was...which made me realize I had NO reference...a preamp with gain + a guitar amp with two stages or more of too much gain...of course I'd hear some hiss
I don't remember from whom I got it on eBay...they were as low as $12 including shipping...silly things like $0.01 + 11.99 shipping and so on. That is what I paid. Mine did not say refurbished, and it didn't look like it.
A bunch of sellers have the same description (model number)...something like 7745?, so I kept digging, and found they appear to be made by a company called BelCat...in China, I think (good guess if not sure, anyway). They make a complete line of all kinds of such devices, but no one seems to sell the other ones, with few exceptions...the or 2 other models I found were quite a bit more, $20-30 plus shipping IIRC.
They make one for a ukelele that was a 2 or 3 freq-range instead of 4, but no convenient source and >>$. I emailed them to ask where it could be purchased, but no response (surprise!)
Next, I took it apart to see what was inside and if I could partially disassemble it to make it thin enough to go in the side of a violin. It was a pain to get apart & took a little thinking & study because the hardware for the slide controls was hidden under a pressure-sensitive panel/label with the markings, etc. I could easily get the metal box cover off...just slides out (spring pressure of the u-shaped cover holds it in place, like a Bud or LMB mini-box, not the cast metal type with screws typical in stomp box construction.
I forget which OP amp it had...4558 maybe (I can let you know, if desired, or if remember to check). It's a dual op amp, noise 'spec' was on the order of 15 nV per root Hz (I can't type that, so I pronounced it)...not the lowest, but lower than many, and a decent number. I did find some 3 nV pre root Hz parts samples in a box given to me a friend who's an engineering tech...those however were quads, and probably cost 10-15x as much. All things being equal, I figured 5x noise reduction = 14 dB, but the friend said I'd never be able to tell in practice.
Once I got it apart (I said it wasn't easy...I used a special solvent (heptane/naptha/don't know what else) we use in our picture framing shop used to release adhesives from substrates...used with care, it's pretty gentle on materials it's intended for.
I was able to peel the self-adhesive label/panel off and get access to the slide pot hardware which allowed me to remove the pc board and see both sides instead of the less-populated back side only. Nearly 100% surface-mount. It has a battery 'sleeve/drawer' with helical spring contacts. I know another engineer who plays guitar and has a guitar he spent a respectable sum on, and his integra preamp had 2 folded 'leaf springs' that he believes get loose for some reason and go intermittent. He thought my $12 mail order one had a better contact arrangement. The battery power cable has a plug that mates with a socket on the PC board, kind of similar to a cordless telephone's rechargeable battery and it passes through a notch in the mini-box...the cable can get pinched if one isn't careful upon reassembly.
The construction quality was OK, typical import consumer product...I found a couple marginal solder joints & solder balls stuck to the PC board, waiting to fall off and rattle around. At least one of the 4 slide pots was missing a mounting screw...which is probably why the controls had different 'tactile feedback'...some were hard to fellethe center detent. More time spent trying to figure out what metric thread diameter, pitch and length screws I need...if I can't take the heat, stay out of the wok, right? After all, it was my idea to get inside...
There were 4 freq ranges I can't remember...ambiguous descriptions like LOW 'MIDD' High and Presence (I remember that range is the highest, centered at 12 kHz). The slide pots were all smaller package and 50 k (don't remember taper, possibly 'B'). Four slide pots and 4 surface mount NPN bipolar transistors...don't remember the part number...BC845 or BC836?, I had to figure out the 2 digit SMD package code, which can lead you to multiple part #'s..this works to verify a known part is correctly installed, but there is no guarantee other than ruling out the drastically different and irrelevant options that use the same code (like ruling out a 3-terminal regulator because it made no sense). Only the NPN transistor correlating with the SMD package code made any sense for such a circuit. I didn't finish trying to draw a schematic because it was reaching the PITA stage at this point...I'm getting too old to read some of those tiny parts, and most tiny SMD ceramic capacitors have no markings...apparently one validates the tape/reel packaging and trusts supplier quality or in-house sampling to verify unmarked parts are what they are said tot be on the package. It was getting to the double PITA stage by now.
I have to dig that out and finish it. I found I can put the slide pots, and tiny rotary volume pot in a mini-Altoids tin (maybe the gum kind), not the sugarless Altoids 'micro'-tin and the rest of the preamp/EQ PC board and the transmitter from a wireless headphone set (more deconstruction PITA and rejection of two 'iPod-type' FM transmitters due to personality disorders like auto-power-off or 4-10 foot transmit). range) will fit in a regular-size Altoids tin. The shapes are not agreeable to the curved bout profile of a violin...that's part of my 'productivity block'...sure is nice that cigar boxes have flat sides!!!
The violin side curve dilemma has a bright light at the end of the tunnel (as long as it's not train!)...a coworker has the back and partial side of an inexpensive German Stradivarius copy on his desk so I'm going to try and solve my mounting-on-the-curve problems 'by inspection'...I might have to ditch the Altoids tin for the pots, mount them on something thin and flexible and use copper tape to shield them in lieu of the steel tin box.
That company BelCat may actually make some quality product...at their higher end, anyway. I though I saw the DSP/preamp/EQ/tuner/metronome that (Washburn?) introduced in the last year or two on the BelCat website. I also thought I saw the B-Band product line, and they are listed under Washburn as being under the umbrella of inventions by a Finnish inventor...
This is getting complicated...here's the lowly $12 model 7545R described above:it comes in different-curvature housings for different guitar bodies, but you don't seem to have any choice on eBay, and the two sellers I asked couldn't even give me external dimensions or hole size or depth required in an instrument (I bet they just have it drop-shipped and didn't have it in-hand to measure).
Replies
Hi Bucky,
It depends on what type of bridge you want/have. If you have a slot big enough to take the width of the piezo you can use a jumbo paperclip as I did here for an old 3/4 classical guitar I had http://www.cigarboxnation.com/forum/topics/installing-my-piezo-prea... (about half way down) - the slot wasn't deep enough for the piezo rod plus standard saddle.
Shane Speal recently posted a thread showing how he mounted it inside a bolt http://www.cigarboxnation.com/forum/topics/the-best-piezo-pickup-iv...
If you try a seach of the building forum for piezo rod/piezo bridge etc you will get some more ideas of what you can do. What kind of wooden bridge have you got?
David
I picked up one of these from CB GITTY- (I'd rather help one of our own guys, than send it overseas) I stuck it in a good sized cigar box and embedded the rod piezzo in the bridge. Great full tone! Much more bass than a regular piezzo, and you can taylor the sound.
I'm very happy with it!
Deke
The CE symbol, when it first became an industry practice, I'll guess early-mid 90's, essentially translates to 'Certified for Europe', but I think the words may actually be French.
I went to some training on it in the mid-90's, so I dunno what may have changed, but then it was required by the EU for importers of products (electronic, electrical, perhaps anything where safety needs to be assured), but VOLUNTARY to apply to such product. That doesn't sound like it makes a lot of sense. The catch was exporters needed to have registered executive(s) with an office on European soil who were legally responsible for compliance to safety standards implemented in EU countries...voluntary to participate, if one wanted to do business in Europe, but expected to indicate compliance if opted to be displayed on product. The office on the 'Continent' was to put some teeth behind fraudulent display of the logo...if product safety was deficient and demonstrably at fault for any significant injury, the executive on European soil was to be the one legally liable. I had a boss who fell into the category of immediately assuming the labels could simply be applied to our products since he was sure 'everyone else' lied about UL etc. with products imported into the US. A case of Pointy-Haired Boss from the Dilbert comic.
Anyway, that never happened.
The ones I saw on eBay, and the one I purchased, had no Belcat logo. I just searched for 7545R or whatever it said until I found Belcat.
If you look up the DigiQ-10 DSP preamp system on the Belcat site, it has their logo. If you look at the Washburn site (all of this took a little persistence), theirs has a Washburn logo on it.
On the other hand, Washburn has an Equis line that looks different to me, and they also have Fishman products, so I guess one can't generalize too much...I think they use what does what they need and that can change as they see fit.
I started out building JFET preamps of what I was trying to do, and there were enough violin preamps on the market that subscribed to the discrete parts over IC's school of thought I tried to go that way. Worked fine, but I got sick of trying to Altoid-tin my headaches. Since this Belcat thing was too big for me anyway, here I am back to Altoids tins.
Thanks for posting the physical dimensions. I just suggested someone do this, saw it had already happened, and came back to edit this post!
I'm one of those people who has some thin boxes and would have gotten pretty far along before realizing I had 10 pounds of preamp for a 5 pound box....
Murray said:
Glad someone found it interesting! I also realize how ironic it that 20 people will have them built into guitars and I'll still be scraping another layer off to see what is underneath...
I was frustrated that all those other options were there lurking under my nose, and couldn't help but wonder how inexpensive the rest were...20 sources for the one in question, the rest being vaporware or a scarce one for US$100 or more...don't need 'em that badly.I haven't put one in an instrument yet. I bought one to see how big it was & if it would fit in the side of a violin...nope, too fat. So, then I took it apart to see what was inside and if I could separate the parts like 'outboarding' the slide pots. Ironic I bought something made in China to partially reverse engineer it, how's that for outsourcing 'payback' ?
So here's kind of a review of what's inside, since I can't tell you what it sounds like. I just plugged it into guitar amp. It's been a while - I can't remember if I used the little molded plastic bridge-shaped pickup it came with, or the 'wrap' elastic-mounted polymer piezo pickup I made, copying Headway Electronics' "The Band". I just tapped it to see if I could hear it and turned the volume up to see how noisy the entire system was...which made me realize I had NO reference...a preamp with gain + a guitar amp with two stages or more of too much gain...of course I'd hear some hiss
I don't remember from whom I got it on eBay...they were as low as $12 including shipping...silly things like $0.01 + 11.99 shipping and so on. That is what I paid. Mine did not say refurbished, and it didn't look like it.
A bunch of sellers have the same description (model number)...something like 7745?, so I kept digging, and found they appear to be made by a company called BelCat...in China, I think (good guess if not sure, anyway). They make a complete line of all kinds of such devices, but no one seems to sell the other ones, with few exceptions...the or 2 other models I found were quite a bit more, $20-30 plus shipping IIRC.
They make one for a ukelele that was a 2 or 3 freq-range instead of 4, but no convenient source and >>$. I emailed them to ask where it could be purchased, but no response (surprise!)
Next, I took it apart to see what was inside and if I could partially disassemble it to make it thin enough to go in the side of a violin. It was a pain to get apart & took a little thinking & study because the hardware for the slide controls was hidden under a pressure-sensitive panel/label with the markings, etc. I could easily get the metal box cover off...just slides out (spring pressure of the u-shaped cover holds it in place, like a Bud or LMB mini-box, not the cast metal type with screws typical in stomp box construction.
I forget which OP amp it had...4558 maybe (I can let you know, if desired, or if remember to check). It's a dual op amp, noise 'spec' was on the order of 15 nV per root Hz (I can't type that, so I pronounced it)...not the lowest, but lower than many, and a decent number. I did find some 3 nV pre root Hz parts samples in a box given to me a friend who's an engineering tech...those however were quads, and probably cost 10-15x as much. All things being equal, I figured 5x noise reduction = 14 dB, but the friend said I'd never be able to tell in practice.
Once I got it apart (I said it wasn't easy...I used a special solvent (heptane/naptha/don't know what else) we use in our picture framing shop used to release adhesives from substrates...used with care, it's pretty gentle on materials it's intended for.
I was able to peel the self-adhesive label/panel off and get access to the slide pot hardware which allowed me to remove the pc board and see both sides instead of the less-populated back side only. Nearly 100% surface-mount. It has a battery 'sleeve/drawer' with helical spring contacts. I know another engineer who plays guitar and has a guitar he spent a respectable sum on, and his integra preamp had 2 folded 'leaf springs' that he believes get loose for some reason and go intermittent. He thought my $12 mail order one had a better contact arrangement. The battery power cable has a plug that mates with a socket on the PC board, kind of similar to a cordless telephone's rechargeable battery and it passes through a notch in the mini-box...the cable can get pinched if one isn't careful upon reassembly.
The construction quality was OK, typical import consumer product...I found a couple marginal solder joints & solder balls stuck to the PC board, waiting to fall off and rattle around. At least one of the 4 slide pots was missing a mounting screw...which is probably why the controls had different 'tactile feedback'...some were hard to fellethe center detent. More time spent trying to figure out what metric thread diameter, pitch and length screws I need...if I can't take the heat, stay out of the wok, right? After all, it was my idea to get inside...
There were 4 freq ranges I can't remember...ambiguous descriptions like LOW 'MIDD' High and Presence (I remember that range is the highest, centered at 12 kHz). The slide pots were all smaller package and 50 k (don't remember taper, possibly 'B'). Four slide pots and 4 surface mount NPN bipolar transistors...don't remember the part number...BC845 or BC836?, I had to figure out the 2 digit SMD package code, which can lead you to multiple part #'s..this works to verify a known part is correctly installed, but there is no guarantee other than ruling out the drastically different and irrelevant options that use the same code (like ruling out a 3-terminal regulator because it made no sense). Only the NPN transistor correlating with the SMD package code made any sense for such a circuit. I didn't finish trying to draw a schematic because it was reaching the PITA stage at this point...I'm getting too old to read some of those tiny parts, and most tiny SMD ceramic capacitors have no markings...apparently one validates the tape/reel packaging and trusts supplier quality or in-house sampling to verify unmarked parts are what they are said tot be on the package. It was getting to the double PITA stage by now.
I have to dig that out and finish it. I found I can put the slide pots, and tiny rotary volume pot in a mini-Altoids tin (maybe the gum kind), not the sugarless Altoids 'micro'-tin and the rest of the preamp/EQ PC board and the transmitter from a wireless headphone set (more deconstruction PITA and rejection of two 'iPod-type' FM transmitters due to personality disorders like auto-power-off or 4-10 foot transmit). range) will fit in a regular-size Altoids tin. The shapes are not agreeable to the curved bout profile of a violin...that's part of my 'productivity block'...sure is nice that cigar boxes have flat sides!!!
The violin side curve dilemma has a bright light at the end of the tunnel (as long as it's not train!)...a coworker has the back and partial side of an inexpensive German Stradivarius copy on his desk so I'm going to try and solve my mounting-on-the-curve problems 'by inspection'...I might have to ditch the Altoids tin for the pots, mount them on something thin and flexible and use copper tape to shield them in lieu of the steel tin box.
That company BelCat may actually make some quality product...at their higher end, anyway. I though I saw the DSP/preamp/EQ/tuner/metronome that (Washburn?) introduced in the last year or two on the BelCat website. I also thought I saw the B-Band product line, and they are listed under Washburn as being under the umbrella of inventions by a Finnish inventor...
This is getting complicated...here's the lowly $12 model 7545R described above:it comes in different-curvature housings for different guitar bodies, but you don't seem to have any choice on eBay, and the two sellers I asked couldn't even give me external dimensions or hole size or depth required in an instrument (I bet they just have it drop-shipped and didn't have it in-hand to measure).
http://belcat.com/bbs/view.php?id=belcatproduct&page=2&sn1=...
...and here is the 'high end' Digi-Q10 :http://belcat.com/bbs/view.php?id=belcatproduct&page=3&sn1=...
Overkill for a ciggie-B, huh?
Would be nice to know what it costs but they didn't respond, as I mentioned.
Hope this was interesting, if not helpful...
Murray
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